Occasionally you come across something to warm the cockles of your heart. I’d long known of Arthur Woods’ ‘B’ crime pic, indeed I remember reading about it in the Halliwell Guide, where he called it, with typically succinct idiosyncrasy, an “excellent little-seen suspenser.” It was years later when I finally got to see it, and in a wretched print, too. It’s never shown on TV, and as for video or DVD you’re having a laugh. Yet here’s a film that wouldn’t be disgraced in comparison with the best of Hitchcock in the thirties. It may not be The 39 Steps or The Lady Vanishes, but it’s at least as good as anything else Hitch made in that decade.

Shorty Matthews is a penny and shilling crook who’s been inside for 18 months for some petty crime or other, and who is released on the day a man is hanged for murder. He decides to go and look up some friends in his old haunts, and then makes his way to see his old flame, Alice, now living the high life as a dance hall hostess. When he gets to her lodgings, he’s horrified to find her dead, strangled with a silk stocking, and, fearing that he’d be the principal suspect, he makes a run for it. Sadly for him, he’s seen leaving the scene of the crime and the police have a description posted in all the evening papers. He decides to catch a lift with some lorry driver up north, and runs into a friend of Alice’s who he convinces of his innocence, and who conspires with him to try and do what they can to find the real murderer.

It has essences of Hitchcock’s Young and Innocent, but this is an altogether darker film. It has been compared to the French fatalist films of the period, and not without due cause, for I can think of no other pre-war British film that captures this mood so effectively. Even in the terrible available print, the photography has a sense of gloomy doom about it, with the incessant rain and the numerous shots of trucks coming and going along muddy roads. The cast, too, are well chosen. Ernest Thesiger has one of his greatest roles as the real murderer, a simpering fetishist ex-teacher every bit as sinister as any of his more famous turns for James Whale. As for Shorty himself, I’d go so far as to say it was Williams’ finest hour. He had something inherently dishonest about him in his youth that prompted movie producers to use him – when they weren’t using his writing talents doctoring up the likes of Evergreen and Hitch’s The Man Who Knew Too Much – as such slime-balls as the crooked bookie in The Stars Look Down, the blackmailer in Friday the Thirteenth or even Caligula in Korda’s doomed I, Claudius. His was a visage born to play such Dickensian miscreants as Urian Heep, Rigaud and Dick Swiveller, an Artful Dodger graduated to hardcore, if cowardly, crime.

The script is taut, well-structured and straight to the point, and then there’s Woods. Of all promising directors lost during the war – Pen Tennyson is the first most people name – surely he was the biggest loss (he was killed in air combat in 1944 after putting his directorial career on hold to fight). Maybe the very notion that sent him into the war when others took the propaganda film route was what made the fatalism of his greatest film so potent. He was only 33 when it was made, and surely had it not been for the fact that Warners – whose subsidiary based at Teddington Studios financed the film – made a film of the same title and also featuring truck drivers two years later and thus made sure the British film wasn’t kept in circulation as a potential rival, it would be better known today. As it is, it’s a dimly lit gem whose mood would not be picked up till It Always Rains on Sunday and They Made Me a Fugitive a decade later.

I have to agree with you Allan, some of these “Brit”ish noir(s) are just wayyyy…to “darker” than their “American counterparts.”

Because I posted this lineup (The British Film Forum Festival Schedule) over there on my friend Gary’s message board and after I read the synopsis of each film… I mentioned to two fellow posters over there on his board, how “darker” in “tone” some of these British film noir are in comparison to some American film noir.

But, I have not had the pleasure of watching this film (They Drive By Night) yet, but I most definitely, plan to seek it out to watch…immediately.

I wonder if anyone had the pleasure of ever watching the fatalistic 1947 film The Code of Scotland Yard. starring Okcar Homolka.
DeeDee 😉

Ah, Dee Dee, a terrific point there!!!! The Brit Noirs I have seen so far are indeed ‘darker’ but I am not nearly the film noir experts that Toyny (and you) are. I can’t stress enough how essential I feel this film is. I was literally blown-away last night, and I was seriously thinking about you and Tony as I exited the Film Forum. (after the second feature, which was very fine) That’s how much of an impression both of you have made over your relentless promotion of this admittedly great film genre. I have not seen THE CODE OF SCOTLAND YARD.

I agree with this sentiment of DeeDee’s as well. And I would even extend it to the French gangster films that were so influence by noir… they are so much darker and at times brutal. Is all of this a result of the Code? I don’t know enough about the history of such things to answer that question, but it’s an interesting point.

This seems like one of those films unfairly neglected due to another film (with the same name) coming along to grab moviegoer’s attentions. I just researched it, and sure enough everybody agrees with Mr. Fish. Count yourself as a lucky camper Sam.

I am obliged to Allan for clearing up a mystery for me in this fine review. I have always assumed there was only one They Drive By Night (the US version), and now realise that in reading about this film elsewhere I had confused it with the later feature.

I have not seen this one as my exposure to British noir is minimal – not through choice but because they are so rarely screened here and due to their unavailability on DVD. So I can’t offer an informed view on whether British noir is darker. Apart from Carol Reed’s films, the only British Noir (apart from Night and the City and Kiss the Blood Off My Hands) I have seen is The Good Die Young (1954), which has a decidedly dark mood.

The book, Film Noir (2002) by Andrew Spicer has a full filmography of British noirs and devotes three chapters to its study. Spicer discusses They Drive By Night and Night of the Fire extensively. This short extract highlights Spicer’s views:

“They Drive by Night casts a sympathetic eye upon the tribulations of the-working class – cold, wet, hungry and broke – and its murderer turns out to be a degenerate middle-class psychopath, Ernest Thesiger’s camp bibliophile, seething with sexual perversions. The final scenes in his elegant flat use expressionist compositions and lighting with confidence and panache. The adaptation softens the novel’s social critique (there is no police brutality) and early scenes that questioned the legitimacy of capital punishment were cut by the censors. However, They Drive by Night shows the passage from the macabre shocker to modern film noir, revealing a paranoid world of social and sexual corruption that exists as the dark underside to respectable British society. Equally impressive was Joseph Somlo’s On the Night of the Fire (US title: The Fugitive, 1939), adapted from F.L. Green’s novel, and directed with typical sensitivity by Brian Desmond Hurst, a riveting psychological study of that favourite English victim, the disgraced petit bourgeois.”

Thanks for that Spicer excerpt Tony! I enjoyed reading it. He’s right on with Thesiger (LOL!!) and the definition of the BRIAN DESMOND HURST film. Allan has a bid on the excellent VHS tape of the latter on e bay, and if he wains we will all have DVRs of it!

I haven’t used them yet, but I’ve seen them advertised. I will speak to Allan in th emorning, but I am almost positive I will be ordering this. And you can be certain you’ll get a copy too! Nice work Jamie!

I am a bit late in commenting but I saw this film about 10 years ago on a bad VHS copy which has long since disappeared from my collection. An excellent film that is sorely off the radar. Woods made quite a few films prior to his death. I wonder if Allan, or anyone has seen any of his other work.

Sam- Glad you are enjoyed the film and the festival in general.
The film is available from Sinister Cinema on DVD ($16.95). If it is the same print they used as the VHS I saw years ago, it is poor quality but there is not much else out there. here is the address:http://store.sinistercinema.com/prostores/servlet/Search

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Wonders in the Dark is a blog dedicated to the arts, especially film, theatre and music. An open forum is highly encouraged, as the site proctors are usually ready and able to engage with ongoing conversation.